Our stagnating economy vs our stagnating education system

Freddie DeBoer has a recent post on education that I think is demonstrative of a fairly common way of thinking about our educational system:

You won’t find this in most education reform debates, but the fact is that a huge part of our education problems are found among a relatively small subset of our public school populations. Many millions of students pass through American public education and are perfectly well served, ready to go compete in that global marketplace I keep reading about. And then you have a numerically small minority who are terribly underserved, in terms of educational outcomes, and who drag down our educational statistics considerably.

My question is whether he would judge how well the American economy is doing using similar logic? I believe Freddie had his druthers we’d undertake some fairly radical changes in our economy, including a much different redistribution system. If the performance of our education system does not merit radical change, then does our economy? I’m not sure the former is obviously outperforming the latter, especially if you judge them by all but the bottom of the distribution.

First, consider that the main long-run criticisms of our economy are related to growth, not levels. In levels we are still the richest country in the world, which is why people complain about stagnating worker incomes, not low worker incomes. But our education system is failing when measured by both level and growth. In comparison to income, which is unbounded in the long-run, there are obviously limits to growth in test scores, but we are far from topping out on these measures. As Tyler Cowen argues in The Great Stagnation, we probably should expect test scores to be going up every year:

Keep in mind that according to the so-called “Flynn effect,” each generation has higher average IQ scores than the last. So if we’re getting smarter on relatively abstract IQ tests but not getting better test scores at school, possibly schools are declining in their productivity, despite all the extra money spent. Or take the constant scores in mathematics. We are a wealthier and smarter nation, more reliant on mathematics in our technology, and there is more mathematics “on tap” in any home computer. If anything, instructional progress, and thus progress measured in scores, is to be expected. You might also think that mathematics hasn’t changed so much in decades, so the better teaching techniques should spread and push out the lesser teaching techniques. That does not seem to have happened on a national scale, and again we must consider the possibility that our educational productivity has on the whole declined.

Median wages may have stagnated since the 70s, but the graduation rate has declined since the 60s. Output in both is a function if inputs as well as productivity, but that’s true in both cases.

The education system and the economy are apples and oranges, and so I’m not looking for the definitive answer as to which is performing better; that may be an impossible question. On the one hand, the education system may be more dependent on inputs that are exogenous to it. On the other hand, in the long-run a lot of inputs like poverty are not completely exogenous to the education system. Furthermore, the education system is a majority public run, which makes how it functions more “manageable”, so to speak, than the economy. But this apples to oranges exercise what I want to do here. I just want to question whether a similar level of apologetics that Freddie applies to the education system leads one to conclusions about the economy that are quite moderate, and even conservative. To say that a system does not need a lot of change because it serves everyone but the worst of well is not a very progressive way to view the world.

14 comments

A helpful exercise for this “apples to oranges” comparison is to think of the USA as a nation of 10 people. If this were the case, then 9 of us would have graduated from high-school, 4 of us would have graduated from college, and 1 would have a post-graduate degree. In comparison, among these exact same ten people 9 would make an average of $31,000 a year and 1 of them would make an average of $164,647 a year. Obviously there’s lots of ways to look at the numbers/averages, but any way you slice it income inequality is a lot worse than educational inequality – it’s almost the inverse of the educational problem. The economy is geared to help the top few to the detriment of most, while education seems to be helping most to the detriment of the few. (whew! long comment. feel free to eviscerate me on the numbers)

“To say that a system does not need a lot of change because it serves everyone but the worst of well is not a very progressive way to view the world.”

I don’t think that is DeBoer is saying that at all though, and to me anyone who is trying to make as much Progress as is logically possible is still a bona fide progressive even if they claim on certain issues that no Progress is possible. I can give DeBoer the benefit of the doubt on the education issue, but I think you shed some light on a gray area here. Slacking off on understanding the issues and then claiming nothing could be done anyways is neither progressive or conservative. The real problem with many progressives would not be logical consistency on these two issues but that many will advocate half-assed measures and miss or ignore potential causes, closing the door on other possible solutions.

Good questions, thanks for the feedback. As I say following your quote, I of course think improving outcomes for the worst off is important. I just think the idea of total institutional change, as ED Kain appeared to be advocating, is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Ultimately I am asking for modesty in goals and modesty in expectations, as many decades of attempts by smart and committed people have not been met with great success.

As far as economics versus education, I think the difference is that resource redistribution is straightforward (you can cut people checks); education redistribution is not. But I imagine you wouldn’t see it that way!

Is pure redistribution in the form of, say higher income taxes with large payments in something like the EITC, really what you want in terms of changing our economic system? I thought I’d read you disparage that as pity charity liberalism, and thought you had more in mind. But I can’t think of the post, or a post, where you lay it out, so I may be mistaken.

Also, I did consider including the next few sentences in that quote of yours, but since I’m not addressing the issue of whether you think we should care about the worst off it seemed beside the point. I hope you don’t feel I misrepresented you, and I definitely to not mean to imply you don’t care about the worst off.

Oh, where I would go with my magic wand is complicated. Yes, I’m skeptical of pity charity liberalism, within a system more or less like our own. Worker empowerment is necessary for a whole host of reasons. But for this limited issue, my point is only that while we have a whole host of arguments for why we shouldn’t redistribute wealth, there’s little question about how to do it. (Take money from Peter, give it to Paul.) There’s no functional way to do it with education.

Although I should point out that this gets back to the constant assertion that “we can’t solve educational problems just by throwing money at them.” Seems very likely to be true– but people say it as if we’ve ever attempted it!

I read your reply as a defense of neoliberal policies as an easy and certain fix to, but I think in another context you would emphasize that neoliberal policies are insufficient to make American households sufficiently better off. That is to say elsewhere you would emphasize that it is not a fix in any meaningful sense, and that more radical changes are necessary.

You’re sort of getting at the more radical policies you’d favor when you say “worker empowerment” is necessary, which I think if expounded upon you would agree means you’re advocating for major changes to our labor market institutions. Whatever policies you’ve got in mind here, I don’t think we know in any sense that these policies would work to improve poor households overall. You may believe more unionization would help poor workers overall, but a lot of labor economists would disagree, and at the very least I think that is as contestable of a “fix” as the radical fixes many propose for our education systems. In short, I’d argue our knowledge of how to improve workers via radical changes to labor market institutions is basically comparable to our knowledge of how to radically improve the education system.

Freddie, hasn’t expenditure per pupil gone up steadily over the decades without much corresponding change in output? I think that’s what people mean when they say throwing money. And wasn’t there an incident in Kansas City where a federal judge ordered them to spend ridiculous amounts on urban schools?

I think, as a progressive who follows economics more closely than educational policy, I would say that while educational redistribution isn’t “simple” the idea of poverty as an exogenous input on poor educational outcomes shouldn’t be understated. Or to put it more simply – lets try cutting those checks for greater income redistribution and see the effect on poor students educational outcomes! – but I agree with Ken S (if I understood him correctly), there just doesn’t seem to be a correlation between economic progressives and their educational policy preferences. My own experience is that some progressives are asking for major institutional changes while others have modesty in their goals and expectations. I think I’m a prime example of someone with strong ideas about progressive income taxation and less fully formed ideas on educational policy. I would probably have to wade into the research on education policy to form any strong opinions on the subject at all.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at exactly. I find to be a hopeless exercise to come up with any basis by which the progress of the economy and education might be compared. I also disagree that our schools are serving the majority of the country adequately. I believe that the upper half of the middle class and up are receiving great educational opportunities, but that it declines quite a bit when you get to lower middle class and working class, and then plummets in truly low-income ares.

Frankly, I don’t think our culture as a whole values education, let alone prioritizes making top-notch education available to everyone. Abstractly, the privileged in this country feel bad for the poor, but they don’t actually want to compete with them for jobs, and I think that’s a major subconscious drag on true progressive movement in educational policy.

Well, Freddie says we don’t need to blow up the whole educational system because it works for most people and we should just tinker on the edges that don’t work and get them up to speed. Adam thinks Freddie feels differently about inequality in the economy and wants to make radical changes to solve this even though it works for most people like education works for most people. Maybe Freddie does want to blow up the economic system and start over, but the only people I see who advocate this are the Libertarians, the Fair Taxers and such (the same ones who want to blow up the educational system). Everyone else seems to want tinkering around the edges but may not agree on which edges.

Your second paragraph is spot on. My school was atrociously bad (rural South in the ’60’s, segregated with two smoking areas for students. How bad was the Black school?) but my parents were adamant about not just A’s but perfect scores on every test. Now we are more concerned with playing time on the football team or evolution in the Biology text book. And just look at the fights over equal funding of schools.

More than anything, I simply find that there is a tremendous amount of liberal education reformers sticking their fingers in their ears and refusing to countenance bad news. But the data is the data. You cannot will yourself to progress, and the consistent obstinacy of school reformers should stop being recognized as a kind of principle. It makes genuine improvement harder, not easier, and is usually motivated by signaling as much as anything else.

I can agree that’s a problem. On the other side, I think a lot of reform critics (there’s no good term for them, but you know who I mean) continue to move the goalposts for what would qualify as either a success or as a problem. This is particularly true of charter schools which, for instance, has led to hysterical claims like Diane Ravitch saying that KIPP has to run an entire district in order to prove they aren’t cream skimming, and now arguing that any system based on choice will by definition constitute cream skimming. A frustrating and stubborn bias is a huge problem on both sides.

And while I think you are clearly sincere and have important first-hand social science knowledge that is often lacking, I think you also exhibit a reactionary bias that is a big problem in this debate. I think this bias makes your complaints overwhelmingly one-sided in areas where there are clearly symmetric problems. Take this paragraph, for instance:

“I am, for obvious reasons, deeply suspicious of the motivations of many involved in education reform, whether conservatives who hate unions, Democratic constituencies, and government efforts like public schooling, or corporate interests who seek to make money by destroying public education and replacing it with their own, accountability-free private surrogates.”

You say you are suspicious of the motivations of many, but then list only those on one side. How can you not be suspicious of the motivations of unions who are obliged by law to be motivated by the self-interest of teachers?

I think my core problem with the post I’m addressing here the reactionary bias I see in it. I read what you’ve written and I am most reminded of someone at, say, the Heritage Foundation writing about poverty. I know that comparison probably rankles, and that’s honestly not some metaphor I came up with while searching for something to barb you with; it was my sincere and immediate reaction to your piece.

I understand the desire to push back hard against some of the radicalness of some reformers. When people argue that teacher salaries should be based on a huge proportion of value-added it’s legitimately worrying. Radical is scary when it’s wrong. But if you can’t see the massive bias problems on both sides of the debate, and aren’t frustrated by things that both sides say and do, then I unfortunately think it means you’re wrapped up in the problem yourself.